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Starcrash

Synopsis

A galactic adventure beyond your wildest dreams!

A pair of smugglers manage to pick up a castaway while running from the authorities, who turns out to be the only survivor from a secret mission to destroy a mysterious superweapon designed by the evil Count Zartharn. The smugglers are soon recruited by the Emperor to complete the mission, as well as to rescue the Emperor's son, who has gone missing.

If movie screens could dream, Starcrash is what the dream would look and sound like. No attempt to hide artifice, instead a headfirst dive into pulp serial lala land. A genre kaleidoscope, a sci-fi lava lamp, gorgeous people giving fractured performances, weird looking people giving weird performances, and various other analog magicks. Only an Italian could lack the self-consciousness to make something so silly and pure. In space, no one can hear you dream.

"So you see into the future. All these years you never told me. Think of all the trouble I might have avoided." she tried to exclaim, apparently struggling to communicate her astonishment from behind her dull, expressionless face. "You would have tried to change the future, which is against the law, so therefore I can tell you nothing," he said, immediately after using his sight into the future to change the future, breaking the law and telling us nothing.

Starcrash is just ridiculous. That's the only thing it is.

It’s impossible to evaluate as a movie by any traditional criteria: the dialogue is laughable, the performances are flat, the plot is contrived in every imaginable way, there's no narrative throughline,…

A cheap Star Wars knock-off with a dash of Barbarella, Starcrash is by most measures a complete piece of shit. The special effects are awful, the acting is grating, and the dialog is perplexing at best. But the filmmakers did some things to make the whole train wreck entirely enjoyable.

1) The whole thing moves super fast. Whatever the plot was, it required the heroine to visit a handful of planets, which meant there was a new setting every few minutes and little time to get bored.

2) There was a ton of special effects. Yeah, they were mostly terrible (which I found to be pretty charming), but the shear amount of effects work that went into this turd is…

What a directionless mess. It's just Caroline Munro lost in Christmas Space, changing outfits as she goes from one level to another, getting captured by locals while in search of a plot, only to find out her knightrider in shining armor is in another castle. By no stretch of the imagination a good, or even entertaining movie, but it's not entirely unwatchable and I love Luigi Cozzi's use of colors.

After watching Maniac I had no idea where to go. How do you follow Maniac? It was so weird/gnarly/awesome/crazy for me to even think of what I might be in the mood for next.

Then while I was watching some of the bonus interviews on the Blu ray I realized that Caroline Munro and Joe Spinell actually met a year or two before when they made Starcrash...so that was the push I needed to finally watch Starcrash.

It went above and beyond all of my expectations and now sits comfortably in my mental list of favorite science fiction flicks.

It's not subtle with it's Star Wars "influences" although the plot isn't very Star Wars-ish. It opens up with a underneath…

A badly written and badly acted Star Wars wannabe... and it's FUCKING HILARIOUS. This is exactly the kinda movie you watch with a group of friends and riff on. Only one person delivers an honestly good performance in the film and that's Christopher Plummer. I honestly have no clue how he manages to keep his composure with all the crazy shit around him and with the lines he has to say.

What a directionless mess. It's just Caroline Munro lost in Christmas Space, changing outfits as she goes from one level to another, getting captured by locals while in search of a plot, only to find out her knightrider in shining armor is in another castle. By no stretch of the imagination a good, or even entertaining movie, but it's not entirely unwatchable and I love Luigi Cozzi's use of colors.

Introductory Note: Hey everyone! Tonight I was sorting through Google Docs and discovered that I wrote a review that I never published. When I watched the movie I wasn’t in the right mindset to really digest the wildness presented to me, and I pretty much left the way I came in. Not exactly the best mood to do a write up, which is why I just did a gag list one instead of a real critique, but even then I believed it was lackluster and not detailed enough compared to my work on Maximum Overdrive and 2Everything2Terrible: Tokyo Drift. It sat collecting dust for a long time until now, and re-reading it, to my surprise it’s actually pretty funny. I…

There are some genres of cinema that have been lost to technological developments and rise of global interconnectivity. One of these genres is the "Italian knockoff of an successful American film." One of the more impressive parts of this cinematic sub-genre is the science fiction film Starcrash, directed by Luigi Cozzi under an American pseudonym to conceal the film's true nature.

The film follows a duo of smugglers, who stumble into a conflict between the Emperor of the Galaxy and an evil overlord who plans to kill the Emperor and take the galaxy over for himself.

Narratively, the film is incredibly weak. The film depends a lot, most likely for budgetary reasons, on telling instead of showing. Cozzi tries to…

Where have you been all my life? I love you and I want to have your babies.

Your amazingness is so amazing that I want to tell you just some of the things that make you so amazing:

Your dialogue.... every word of it. Joe Spinell is an evil Count.... with a cloak. Caroline Munro's prison issue bikini. John Barry thinking he's scoring another James Bond movie. Even English speaking actors are redubbed. Stuff just happens. Not even Christopher Plummer can make sense of his lines. Unknown planets have names. Your robot sounds like a good 'ol boy from The Dukes of Hazzard. Your shuttles look like a capsule from the London Eye and have no visible means…